Polo Tang & team, UBS
The UBS crew under Polo Tang rises one rung to third place. The five analysts make “excellent sparring partners with whom to debate the finer points of specific investment themes,” according to one money manager. The London-based team covers 28 names, and among the companies they recommend are two U.K.-based outfits: British Sky Broadcasting Group, a satellite and pay-TV services provider, and legal and textbook publisher Pearson. They are negative on U.K.-based newspaper publisher Daily Mail and General Trust and French advertising agency Publicis Groupe. “Advertising is now only a third of sector revenues, with the rest being either corporate expenditure — scientific journals, legal subscriptions, educational textbooks — or consumer expenditure, such as pay-TV and broadband subscriptions,” Tang explains. “As a result, the sector is more consumer staple in nature, given the high proportion of subscription revenues, than consumer cyclical.”